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Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Great work so far, but I note you are looking at a custom double-decker railcar with what looks like a very large loading gauge. My understanding is that for most of Europe, double deckers are not used due to loading gauge limits imposed by tunnels, bridges and so on. I presume your planned routes take that into account? Is that one of the reasons your mocked journey planner app doesn’t include the UK?

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I'm not sure if that's just my narrow view of europe, but most european railways seem to run double decker trains (albeit not on all lines). Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary are the countries I can recall using double deckers with only the UK being generally unable to use them.

The UK has adequate loading gauge for double deckers on HS1/Chunnel and HS2 (though I'm not sure if the Euston extension will support it or not).

We can run London - Europe double decker today and if we connected HS2 to HS1 it would probably be possible to run from Birmingham, Crewe and Manchester to continental Europe too.

The „current“ concept is for refurbished standard passenger coaches, which is compatible everywhere in Europe except UK.

The „long term“ concept is built around to be compatible with profiles UIC GB and G2, which work in most of Europe.

We have sleeper trains in the UK, it would obviously be great if they were cheaper but honestly there's not that much demand for travel from London - Scotland or Penzance in general. This is exacerbated by the fact a daytime train is easily doable so it's a bit of weird, niche product.

However the amount of demand there'd be for an overnight train from (let's just say) London to Barcelona at £99 each way would be immense.

You can run London to Europe via HS1 and tunnel, but the operating costs are insane. Anybody who propose that would get shut down by the „rail bubble“ extremely hard (like midnight trains did a couple years back). I think it would be nice, but it’s far off.

As for intra-UK sleeper: yes there are some possible routes, but the market is small. Developing custom trains for that would be very expensive. And the concepts we propose don’t work well cut the profile is so small.

This was true a few years ago, but today the regulatory environment is very positive for these kind of services. You will see many non-eurostar open access operators on those tracks within the next year or two.

I wouldn't massively bother with intra-uk yet, I agree wholeheartedly.

We have them in Switzerland. Often had to change train at the border and never thought it could be a technical limitation.

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